What’s Wrong with the Internet?
Author
Andrew Keen offers a stirring guide to how the Internet has changed
everything—mostly for the worse.
The
Internet Is Not the Answer
by Andrew Keen, Atlantic Monthly
Press, 2015
Here’s yet another in a growing list
of books attacking the brave new Internet-centric world we live in. In the rich
vein mined by authors such as Evgeny Morozov (The Net Delusion), Jaron Lanier (You Are Not a Gadget), and Nicholas Carr (The Glass Cage), Andrew Keen brings us The Internet Is Not the
Answer. Keen argues that “rather than
democracy and diversity…all we’ve got from the digital revolution so far is
fewer jobs, an overabundance of content, an infestation of piracy, a coterie of
Internet monopolists, and a radical narrowing of our economic and cultural
elite.”
Those are pretty strong words, and
indeed, Keen’s book is essentially a diatribe about the damage the Internet has
done to our economy, our culture, and our sense of ourselves. Yet Keen speaks
from experience. He founded Audiocafe.com, a first-generation Internet company,
in 1995, and is currently the host of the “Keen On” Techonomy chat show and a
columnist for CNN. Unlike more philosophically grounded books such as Morozov’s
and Lanier’s, however, The Internet Is Not the Answer takes a decidedly
empirical approach to the problem. Keen deploys more than 40 pages of footnotes
(but no index) to back up his argument. However, the citations come mostly from
frightening news stories or other journalists who happen to agree with him.
Much of what the 54-year-old Keen,
who was born and raised in the U.K. and trained as a historian and political
scientist, says will be familiar both to readers of his two previous books (Digital Vertigo, The Cult of the Amateur) and to those interested in the impact of the
Internet—positive and negative alike—on society. Despite the many claims by
technological optimists to the contrary, for example, Keen points out that
“distributed technology doesn’t necessarily lead to distributed economics, and
the cooperative nature of [the Internet’s] technology isn’t reflected in its
impact on the economy.” Instead, thanks in part to the massive network effects
inherent in the Internet, ours has become a winner-take-all economy. This, of
course, will be nothing new to anyone concerned about the rise of the so-called
1 percent.
Keen’s description of the Internet’s
effect on culture is more incisive. Again, he offers little that’s truly new on
this front; however, the examples he cites are truly alarming. It’s difficult
not to agree with his heartfelt rage at the prevalence of digital piracy. By one
estimate, “in January 2013 alone…432 million unique Web users actively searched
for content that infringes copyright.” Meanwhile, global sales of music had
declined, he notes, from US$38 billion in the late 1990s to a little over $16
billion by the end of the 2000s. Are streaming sites like Spotify and Pandora
the solution for artists seeking to make a living from their craft? Not
according to Keen, who points out that after one of songwriter Ellen Shipley’s
hit songs was streamed more than 3 million times on Pandora, she received a
royalty check for $39.61.
It’s difficult not to agree with his
heartfelt rage at the prevalence of digital piracy.
The Internet Is Not the Answer is full of similar gory details of how the Internet’s
massive consumer surplus can also create artistic and economic deficits. And
they make good reading, especially, of course, if you already agree with Keen.
Yet Keen is often at his best when he reverts to actual reporting. The book
begins with a description of the Battery, a recently established private club
in San Francisco whose founders claim to be trying to re-create a “village pub”
with a diverse clientele of regulars, but who have actually done little more
than replicate the growing gap between the rich and poor in the city as a
whole.
Keen also takes a memorable trip to
Rochester, N.Y., where he describes vividly how the collapse of industrial-era
stalwart Kodak has ravaged the city. He notes that Kodak, which once minted
massive profits manufacturing, processing, and printing film, laid off 47,000
workers in 2013, the same year Instagram sold itself to Facebook for $1
billion. At the time, the photo-sharing company had just 13 full-time
employees. Keen is fully aware of the irony implicit in seeing Kodak, which
single-handedly brought photography within reach of the masses, being
disintermediated by Instagram, which is filling the same role for free. In his
view, however, the billions of dollars in value created for consumers by
Instagram, as well as Skype, WhatsApp, and similar new technologies, do not
compensate for what’s lost in the process.
Like many other diatribes, however, The
Internet Is Not the Answer all too often deteriorates into mere
complaining. Keen is at his worst when rehashing the case against Uber or
describing, yet again, the rise of San Francisco’s exclusive tech buses. And he
takes great pleasure in bashing Google: While lauding the company’s genius, he
returns time and again to its sins—its anti-privacy stance, its role in the
creation of a surveillance society, its deleterious effect on cultural
production, its monopolistic power. Again, this is all pretty familiar
territory by now, and some readers will likely find these passages tiresome.
Still, Keen’s overall point is an
important one: “Creative destruction” is all fine and good, so long as once
you’ve destroyed something, something else besides massive wealth for a very
few founders and investors gets created in its place. The Internet has
prospered greatly by pandering to the “consumer” as the be-all and end-all of
its commercial existence—Free music! Free news! Selfies! Instant gratification!
What’s not to like?—while discounting the importance of the “citizen,” who, in
Keen’s account, has suffered greatly over the past two decades through the loss
of jobs, privacy, and collective identity, and a declining sense of the common
good. And the notion that all is OK because it is in the very nature of the
Internet to leave the wreckage he describes behind is, in his view, no excuse.
If the Internet is not the answer,
what is the answer? In Keen’s view, the solution to these problems lies in the
hope that the Internet will grow up. But that won’t happen unless governments
and companies are willing to counter the Internet’s most problematic effects
through laws, regulations, and changes in how companies do business. Harking
back to the trust busters of the Progressive Era, Keen surveys the many current
efforts to rein in the tech companies’ monopolistic control, their massive data
collection programs, their infringements on copyright, and their enabling of
hate speech. He sees progress, but not enough as yet. Still, he puts his faith
in history and the sense that change is inevitable. Ultimately, he believes,
the disruptors will themselves be disrupted. What that will lead to is
anybody’s guess.
by Edward H. Baker
http://www.strategy-business.com/article/00311?pg=all
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